New information is emerging every day. Every day we each learn many new things, some valuable and some not so valuable. Some of this knowledge is valuable only to ourselves, but much of it is valuable to the world at large. In the corrosion field, practitioners are learning new
things every day. Knowledge developed in the research laboratory spreads into the corrosion community through publication. The vast majority of the new knowledge, however, is based on experience and remains in the mind of the practitioner. This experienced-based knowledge is every bit as valuable to the practitioner's company, and the corrosion community as a whole, as the laboratory-based knowledge developed by the researcher. This paper will discuss the use of computer-based communications technology to tap into the experienced-based knowledge in the corrosion community and preserve it in a manner that makes it available to others in the practitioner's company, and to the corrosion community as a whole.
Keywords: knowledge management, tacit knowledge, explicit knowledge, knowledge transfer, list server, threaded discussion forum.